Analytics Reporting in BizTalk360

Analytics Reporting in BizTalk360

You might have seen various people use this term “reporting and analytics” interchangeably to describe the typical application and use of data — to track the ongoing health of the company and to inform decision making. Reporting helps companies to monitor their business and be alerted to when data falls outside of expected ranges. Reporting is the act of translating raw data into information. This raw data can come from a multitude of data sources such as a production database, an operational database like MySQL, Google Analytics and a CRM system like Salesforce. While the reporting that comes out of these databases are useful, they’re often standardized and summarized versions of raw data. This might be enough information for your business, but to get the most out of your data—you need analytics.

In case of BizTalk Server, your day to day monitoring analytics may cover various aspects of performance like BizTalk Servers performance, CPU performance, etc.. BizTalk360 offers out of the box capabilities that provide a graphical display of the key performance metrics of the BizTalk Server. In any business environment, these metrics will be of critical importance for the management to take business decisions. As of version 8.6, BizTalk360 provides the option for users to generate PDF documents of critical performance metrics at specific time periods depending on the requirement.

BizTalk360 Reporting

We have introduced a new section called Reporting under Analytics section. BizTalk360 enables you to create and switch between multiple reports and widgets of your choice, enabling you to visualize the BizTalk performance information in the way you want it. The Reporting section is mainly introduced to monitor the performance of server, host, IIS and disk usage of the most important BizTalk databases. These are the custom reports that you can access with the help of analytics, which can also be delivered on a recurring basis to a group of end users. The Reports provide a comprehensive, high-level view of business performance for specific audiences.

Reporting Schedule

You can create a schedule and configure it to a schedule type based on the requirement. There are three types of the schedule available:

  • Daily
  • Weekly
  • Monthly

The Daily report will be sent to the user, on the configured timing (Say 10am every day).

The Weekly report will be sent every week at the configured time for the user (say every Monday 11am).

The Monthly report will be sent once in a month on the set date and time (Say 15th of every month at 11am).

Once the schedule is created, the user can map the schedule to a report. We are able to edit schedules and to, delete schedules. Once the schedule is created, there is an option for disabling the schedule and if you don’t want the email alert for that time duration you can enable the option Disable Schedule.

Manage dependency

BizTalk360 is designed such that majority of the functionalities will work out of the box without any configuration. However, certain features will depend on Third-Party files which need to be installed separately. The BizTalk360 Reporting functionality requires certain dependency files for users, to be able to download PDF reports and/or trigger email notifications about the health of the BizTalk Server environment. This dependency file is required for BizTalk Reports to map the report for the created schedule.We have an option to download the dependency file from Settings -> Manage Dependencies section. The Dependency file will get downloaded in the Source folder (Web-> Dependencies ->Analytics). From the Source folder, the file will get copied to the Destination folder (Analytics folder).

biztalk360 analytics

Reporting Action

Reports can be created and mapped to the schedules which have been created and widgets can also be added to the reports based on the requirement. You can add, remove and customize the widgets based on the necessity. Widgets in the report will have the live data. Reports will be sent to the configured email address at the configured time. Reports have historic data section where you will be able to see the live data and the historical data. Historical data will contain the data of the reports which has been sent in the email alert.

Following are the widgets which are available in the reports. You can add, remove and Customize the widgets based on the necessity.

  1. BizTalk Hosts Performance
    • by CPU
    • by Memory
  2. BizTalk Server Performance
  3. SQL Server Performance
    • MessageBox Database Disk Usage
    • MessageBox Database Top 5 Tables
    • Tracking Database Disk Usage
    • Tracking Database Top 5 Tables
  4. IIS server Performance
  5. Messaging Performance
    • BizTalk Messaging Performance
    • Message Volume by Schema
  6. Transmission Failure Rate
    • by Schema (Top 10)
    • by Port (Top 10)
  7. Event Log Data Count
    • BizTalk
    • SSO
    • SQL Server
    • Internet Information Server
    • BizTalk360 Monitoring Service
    • BizTalk360 Analytics Service
  8. Message Box KPI

biztalk360 analytics reporting

Report notification history

Based on the report settings, BizTalk360 will trigger the reports to the users through email with the PDF attachment of the reporting dashboard.  The Report notification history shows you whether the email is delivered to the configured email address or not.

biztalk360 analytics reporting

I hope this blog has given some useful information about Reporting section in Analytics. Please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@biztalk360.com, if you want to know more about this particular feature or any other feature in BizTalk360.

What is Web Endpoint and how it can be monitored?

What is Web Endpoint and how it can be monitored?

What is Web Endpoint?

In simple terms, a web service endpoint is a web address (URL) at which customers of a specific service can gain access to it. By referencing that URL, customers can get to operations provided by that service. The endpoint is a connection point where HTML files or active server pages are exposed. Endpoints provide information needed to address a Web service endpoint.

Why Web Endpoint:

Typically, in a BizTalk environment, an application needs to associate with external web endpoints to monitor and validate the health of the web endpoint. BizTalk360 allows the administrators to set up web endpoints monitoring for the web services in the solution and validate the actual response code against the expected return code.

Before version 8.1, web endpoint monitoring had the capability to manage the external endpoints using options like to provide authorization credentials and with a proxy. While monitoring the endpoint, if there is any mismatch between the expected return code and actual return code, the system will alert to the administrator with the information. In 8.1 version, we have improved with some more interesting options like Payload and Custom HTTP headers.

Basic Detail

In basic detail, we can give the Endpoint name which is going to be monitored. In Endpoint URL, we can give the URL of the web endpoint for ex. www.google.com

web service endpoint monitoring with BizTalk360

Optional details configuration

In this section, we can have a deep look at the new optional settings available for monitoring the endpoint. This is an optional section, you can skip this configuration.

Authorization credentials:

Web endpoint will require Username and Password for monitoring. In that scenario, we can utilize this option. For ex, if we need to access remote machine URL, in this case, we need to specify the domain name, user name, and password. If you can monitor the endpoint without any issue, then it will be healthy else it will return an error message.

web service endpoint monitoring with BizTalk360

Proxy:

Some organization will be using a proxy, in that case, you can give the proxy details to monitor the endpoint. In you enable the toggle button near the Use Gateway Proxy it will fetch the proxy details which we have given in the settings -> gateway settings. Global gateway settings can be overridden by giving the below details

  • Server Name– the name of your proxy server
  • Port Number– the port number used to associate through your proxy
  • Proxy username– the username to associate with the proxy server
  • Proxy password– the password to authenticate the credentials to associate with the proxy server

web service endpoint monitoring with BizTalk360
web service endpoint monitoring with BizTalk360

Payload:

When data is sent over the Internet, each of the transmitted unit includes both header information and the actual data being sent. The header identifies the source and destination of the packet, while the actual data is referred to as the payload. The part of the message or code that carries the data. In a key-length-value structure, the key and length are descriptive data about the value (the payload). Here we can configure the parameters of GET or POST methods. Some Endpoints cannot be monitored without giving additional parameters. We can retrieve those information’s using payload and monitor those API in web endpoints.

web service endpoint monitoring with BizTalk360
web service endpoint monitoring with BizTalk360

Custom header:

HTTP headers allow the client and the server to pass additional information with the request or the response. You can give custom headers along with the endpoint which you are going to monitor. (Ex:  Accept-Charset, Accept-Language, Allow, Authorization, Content-Language)

web service endpoint monitoring with BizTalk360

Response alert configuration

Here comes the response alert configuration section, you can see three type of response format. We will see one by one.

Response Format:

Plain text: In this type, you can see Keyword alert where you can specify the keyword which will be available in the endpoint which you are monitoring

Ex. Let’s go with www.google.com

If you mention the keyword as Success and if it is present in the endpoint the status will be healthy based on the conditions.

web service endpoint monitoring with BizTalk360

XML: Here you can see _XPath Alerts, you can even monitor your endpoints using XPath.

Ex.  You have an endpoint with XML data and you need some specific information in that case you can give XPath and monitor the endpoint. Say, your endpoint is having information about employees and you want to fetch the name of the 3rd employee, at that time you can give as

//employees/employee/lastName        Jones

Example:

<employees>
     <employee>
         <firstName>John</firstName> <lastName>Doe</lastName>
     </employee>
     <employee>
         <firstName>Anna</firstName> <lastName>Smith</lastName>
     </employee>
     <employee>
         <firstName>Peter</firstName> <lastName>Jones</lastName>
     </employee>
 </employees>

If the given XPath values are true, then endpoint will be healthy else it will show error/ warning based on the configurations.

web service endpoint monitoring with BizTalk360

JSON:  Same as XPath you can see JSON path alerts, and monitor the endpoint using JSON path. Say, for an example, an endpoint with Json data and looking for some specific data – 3rd employee:

{“employees”: [
{ “firstName”:”John”, “lastName”:”Doe” },
{ “firstName”:”Anna”, “lastName”:”Smith” },
{ “firstName”:”Peter”, “lastName”:”Jones” }
]}

$. employees [2]..firstName peter

If the given Json path values is true, then endpoint will be healthy else it will show error/ warning based on the configurations.

web service endpoint monitoring with BizTalk360

Return Code Alert:

Endpoints can be monitored based on the return codes. If you set return code as 200 and while monitoring if the endpoint does not have the expected return code. then it will indicate error/warning based on the configuration else it will be healthy.web service endpoint monitoring with BizTalk360

Response time Alerts:

The same way we can monitor the endpoints using response time. We can monitor the delay of the endpoint using this setting. We can change the response time based on the necessity.

web service endpoint monitoring with BizTalk360

Based on the configuration we have provided we will get the notification in email.

web service endpoint monitoring with BizTalk360

Conclusion:

So I hope this blog gave you some idea about how you can monitor Web Endpoint in BizTalk360. If you have any questions, contact us at support@biztalk360.com. Also, feel free to leave your feedback in our forum.